+34 3432039232 moreno.coco.i@gmail.com

PROJECTS

Memory mechanisms in healthy and pathological ageing
Memory is one of the most important component of the cognitive system. Impairment in memory processes are usually among the first sign of neuro-degeneration in pathological ageing. My research in this topic tries to uncover the cognitive principles that govern a healthy memory,  so to identify what is spared and what is instead impaired by neuro-pathology. Reaching this understanding would enable us to device diagnostic tools to predict dementia when in prodromal stage and design cognitive training strategies to ameliorate its detrimental impact.  
Human language in context
Among the most fascinating faculty of human cognition is our ability to communicate. Language though never happens in a vacuum, and it is occurs concurrently with other cognitive modalities, e.g., vision. In this context, my research tries to capture how language relate to perception, and aspire to ground its abstraction and formalism to a more concrete grammar based on the meaning our senses return us.  
Synchronistic cognition

Humans live in a very interactive context, requiring very frequent exchange of information with con-specifics, which itself requires subtle temporal calibration of linguistic and non-linguistic responses. Mechanisms of alignment, such as imitation, entrainment, or priming, are fundamental to achieve shared understanding, and consequently optimize joint-action during cooperative tasks.
In this research, we examine the conditions under which alignment is a positive predictor of task success. We have shown, for example, that: (a) interlocutors who could not exchange feedback during collaborative search tasks aligned their gaze more, and that highest gaze alignment corresponded to lower task performance, in contrast to most models of dialogue (Coco, ea, 2018, TopiCS) and (b) the time-course of bodily coordination during a cooperative block-stacking task is different for head and wrist, and influenced by task role (e.g., leader vs. follower), Coco, ea, 207, TAMD.

Attentional and neural correlates of the visual system

Theories of active visual perception emphasize the important role that task goals, and memory mechanisms, have on the allocation of visual attention during scene understanding.
In this context, our has demonstrated that: (a) eye-movement statistics can be used to train classification algorithms to predict the associated task very accurately (Coco and Keller, 2014, JoV), and that (b) in a visual search task, older participants primed with contextual information perform significantly worse than younger participants, especially when the target object is inconsistent with the primed context, suggesting that reliance on mechanisms of contextual expectations becomes stronger as we age (Borges and Coco, 2015, EAP CogSci, proceedings).

The cognitive architecture routinely relies on expectancy mechanisms to evaluate the plausibility of stimuli and establish their sequential congruency.
Here, we demonstrate: (a) the interaction of expectancy mechanisms of stimulus plausibility and congruency on action-dynamics responses (Coco and Duran, 2017, PBR), and (b) the differential neural signatures of congruency (first) and plausibility (later) effects (Coco, ea, 2017, Neuropsychologia).